A brief-yet-ongoing journal of all things Carmi. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll reach for your mouse to click back to Google. But you'll be intrigued. And you'll feel compelled to return following your next bowl of oatmeal. With brown sugar. And milk.

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Saturday, September 29, 2012

Rogers goes down. Ears turn red

News from Pitkinville - okay, southern Ontario, but Pitkinville sounds so much more sardonic - is that Rogers, the largest telecom company in the known universe, is experiencing a major outage. As a result, Internet users in Canada's most populous zone are stuck sending each other messages via carrier pigeon.

I know this to be true because I learned it all on the Internet - TechCrunch article here. Which, for me, apparently still works. Because I'm not using Rogers. Please don't hate me.

Your turn: What do you do when your Internet goes down? I lean toward reading, walking and speaking with real, live people. What's your backup plan?

Update - 9:00 p.m. - Heard from Melissa James on Facebook. She sat on the phone waiting for someone from Rogers. When she got through, this is what she was told: "It'ss not just Rogers customers, but Bell and others because it's a DNS problem. If you type in Google's IP address (74.125.226.84 ) and it appears, your service with your provider is fine, just the internet (DNS) is down." This is confirmed by one of the top telecom analysts I know, Mark Tauschek: "Apparently DNS is the culprit - try 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 for DNS servers." So...change your DNS settings and you should be fine.

I ditched Rogers DNS almost 8 months ago, when I identified that their servers were randomly failing to respond to queries sporadically. Their support people refused to even acknowledge there was a problem ("no other customers have complained about flaky DNS"), let alone fix it.